


Like Sylph, Like Stone

by lovetincture



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, Coming of Age, Gen, Post-Episode: s10e05 Fan Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 11:14:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25968700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Monsters are real. Ghosts are real. When you were fifteen, you saw an ancient Greek goddess erupt in violet after you shoved a stick through her chest, right in the middle of your school play.None of this is as groundbreaking or as life-altering as anyone figures it would be. People liked your play. That was always the most important part of that night, to you. It's the part you took with you.A love letter to fannish joy.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20





	Like Sylph, Like Stone

**Author's Note:**

> I don't usually like the meta episodes of Supernatural because I find them mean-spirited and antagonistic to fans. I was expecting to feel the same about "Fan Fiction," but I was shocked at how full of heart it was. It felt like the show poked as much fun at itself as anything else, and the fan-ward ribbing felt gentle and loving. It felt like the difference between letting fans in on a joke and making them the butt of the joke.
> 
> Here's my little love letter in return.

Monsters are real. Ghosts are real. When you were fifteen, you saw an ancient Greek goddess erupt in violet after you shoved a stick through her chest, right in the middle of your school play.

None of this is as groundbreaking or as life-altering as anyone figures it would be. You're a teenage girl, and you're a reader, which means you live half in the realm of fiction anyway. Gods can be real. Love is true. You're going to live forever, or at least you feel like it when the night air kisses your skin, surrounded by friends in the park by your house.

People liked your play. That was always the most important part of that night, to you. It's the part you took with you.

Your favorite author came up to you after, all alone in the deserted auditorium after everyone but Maeve had left. He told you  _ not bad. _ The praise burned in your chest like a sun. You cradled it like Prometheus. But after the ecstasy, the math class.

Every summer seems endless, every year of your life. It passes with a quickness you weren’t expecting. You show up to your high school graduation with Metric lyrics ringing in your head, Emily Haines’ warbling voice crooning  _ there’s a place that ends here, I know. When they close the gates I’ll cry. _ You do. You smile and laugh and cry. You kiss your friends on the cheeks, drunk on laughter and youth, drunk on possibility.

You stay up all night. You take pictures with a $5 Kodak camera. The scene shifts and bends.

Cut to: you in your dorm room at college.

You with your brand new Target furniture. Your trusty notebook, your shoebox full of memories that you keep tucked beneath your bunk bed, even here. Especially here. You’ve never felt so far from everything that makes you you, all your life.

You left most of your things back home with your parents. You brought  _ Dark Side of the Moon _ because it’s your favorite book. The Fourth of July fireworks scene kills you every time. You keep it on your desk, next to your laptop and your headphones and your letter from Maeve.

Art school isn’t what you thought it would be. Everyone has an angle. Everyone wants to be cool—yourself included. You don’t know when you started wanting that. Everyone dresses better than you, like there’s some Cool Kid memo that you never got in the mail. You still wear the graphic tees and skinny jeans that you wore in high school. You still trace your waterline with black eyeliner because you never got the cat eye thing.

You don’t talk about  _ Supernatural _ because it’s dorky and weird. You try to like the right things in the right way. A certain branch of your joy withers for lack of sun.

But you still find things to love. There is magic, even here. You travel up to the lake, the California cold shivery against your skin. The air is clean and dry, and you imagine it burns your lungs clean when you breathe it in. The lake is closed at night, but that can’t stop you—not you and your friends, young and alive and invincible. You travel in a pack, kids you know and some you don’t. You find brotherhood in the night, beneath the yawning sky and all its stars.

Someone carries wood—you bought it from the grocery store because you’re artists, you’re city kids. You’ve never swung an ax, but oh baby can you dream. Someone carries booze, a handle of rum, a fifth of vodka. Someone’s holding weed. You walk past residential streets, voices hushed and still too loud. The night can’t contain you—not you, not them. Not all this life that sizzles beneath your skin, crackling like a live wire. You think no one has ever felt this fine. You breathe it all in and long to hold it in your chest for all time.

You build up a bonfire at the edge of the lake, the sand rubbing cold beneath your bare toes. People talk in hushed voices around the campfire. You pass around a bottle, taking nips of cheap rum, smacking your tongue against the roof of your mouth to soothe the burn. Someone tells a joke, and you laugh, soaking into the warm, pleasant feel of your own skin.

The woods are quiet all around you, darker than dark where your fire doesn’t reach. Ghosts are real, and monsters exist, but none of them can touch you in this moment. This moment is yours. You are young and free. You think this is how people have always felt, generations stretching back through time before time even deigned to exist, huddling around a fire to beat back the dark—the creatures within and all man’s fears. To the storytellers belong the spoils.

A boy makes a pass at you, and you kiss him because you’re drunk. Because you’re happy and alive, and he’s almost what you want. His fingers are cold and his mouth tastes like sugar and fire. He puts his hand on the side of your neck, and you pull back with a grin.

You twist out of his reach, too alive for love. Too in love with the world just then. Melissa is at the edge of the water, stripped down to her bra and panties. Her skin glows like an opal beneath the moon, out beyond the bonfire’s grasp. Wild tendrils of light reach for her, but she’s slipping away, into the lake with a peal of a shriek.

You look at the boy, and he looks at you with a fond smile on his face—half grasping, half as in love with you as you are in this moment—the promise of your skin, the fervency of your beautiful life. You smile as an apology, but you’re already gone. You’re stripping your shirt above your head, leaving a trail of clothes down to the lakeshore. You plunge feet-first into the water, cold as hell and shining beneath the moon.

The blackness welcomes you as you wade in, undaunted, gasping for breath as its ice surrounds you like a vice.

“How’s it feel?” someone calls from the shore.

“Fuckin’ cold!” Melissa hollers back.

Melissa looks at you, and you look at her. You laugh, clinging to each other, slippery-wet skin riddled with goosebumps, laughing through chattering teeth.

Jump cut: you’re a recent college grad.

You made it through college by the skin of your teeth, fought your way through the twin dogs of depression and anxiety. You have the scars to prove it. Monsters exist, and some of them live in your head. That’s okay. What doesn’t kill you makes you tough, and you are. Tough. You have a job where you show up on time. There’s a bar in your neighborhood that feels like yours.

You move from dorm to apartment. You share it with four people your age. In July, you hang out in the kitchen, sweating through your clothes and talking shit about your bosses. You stopped going home for the summers; it’s a profound relief at the same time that it isn’t. You’re aware of your parents’ mortality in a way you never used to be. You’re aware of a lot of things: tax day and Sallie Mae and the pandemic out the window. 

Your parents move to a condo, citing a house that’s too big, the property taxes too high now that there are no kids at home. They ask you to come get your things. You say  _ of course. _ Your mom says  _ love you, _ and you say  _ you too. _ You are so anxious to get off the phone, half-distracted flicking through your Twitter and already dreading the drive. You want so badly to tell her how much she means to you. You hang up the phone and listen to The Shins.

Sifting through your childhood is an acute kind of pain, a sweetness that stings like a knife.  _ I remember, _ you think, pawing through the evidence of your former selves. Ghosts are real, and they live in your memories.

You find letters from Maeve. Yearbooks signed by people you never said more than two words to, a sea of ‘Have a great summer!’ in multi-colored Sharpie. You find pictures of yourself from the days when you thought you were so fat, so hideous, and you’re shocked at how beautiful you were. You find the stories you wrote.

You spend an hour on the floor of your parents’ attic, reading the fic you wrote when you were seventeen, when you were fourteen, when you were twelve. You find the screenplay for Supernatural: The Musical. You haven’t thought about it in years.

A lot of it makes you cringe. You were so goddamn earnest, so earnest it burns. Your metaphors were florid and your prose tended toward the ultraviolet, but hey, you think. Some of it is pretty good. You sit on the ground and rub the floorboards beneath your palms, reading the stories your former self cooked up. She had such a thing for Sam, that other you. You’re still half in love with Sam Winchester, in the way you love all the things you’ve had to leave behind.

You remember it, being so in love with the idea of love. Eternity with your ride-or-die by your side. Yeah, that’s what love was.

You’re shocked to find that you miss her. You. The you that you used to be. You got a lot of things wrong, teenage know-it-all that you were, but you got a lot right, too.  _ I’m proud of you, _ you want to say.  _ You did good, kid. You did the best you could, and it was more than enough.  _ You’re still looking for that kind of love.

You pack up a box of the things you can’t live without, and you bring them home with you. Halfway there, you turn off the radio, listening to the sound of silence. You sort of wish you could cry. You start composing an essay in your head instead.

The rest of your  _ Supernatural _ books join  _ Dark Side of the Moon _ on your shelf, wedged between  _ A Natural History of the Senses  _ and  _ Candide. _ You rarely read them anymore, but you like to run your fingers over their spines from time to time. Their nearness brings you comfort.

You’ve found other things to love, but sometimes you think of Sam and Dean—their courage and heart; their blinding, unending love.

Sometimes you think, Yeah. Me too.

**Author's Note:**

> You can say hello on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture).


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